Here's What Is In Store For The Future Of Blender

As exclusive Blender users, we here at Blue Crescent Studio are the first to champion the successful introduction of Blender 2.80. Its arrival was like a breath of fresh air to our creative process with the rendering engine, Eevee being the highlight. It is so satisfying to have your work rendered in real-time before the project is completed. Other little touch-ups such as the improvements to Cycles and the UI are all extra gravy on an already well-cooked dish. However, as we all know in the world of software development, nothing is perfect. Thus, it was no surprise to see that Blender 2.80 was updated twice since its release with the promise of more to come.  

So what exactly can we expect from the Blender developers in the future? Thanks to a new post over at the official Blender Developers Blog, we got our answers and more:

"Blender LTSThe first proposal is to do one Long Term Support (LTS) release every year. This release would be supported for two years with important bug fixes and updates for new hardware, while strictly maintaining compatibility.
A good reason to do an LTS now is the focus on fixes and patches of the past months. The next release (2.83) although big, will be relatively less experimental, thus a good candidate to keep supporting for a while.
LTS versions also will help to ensure that a project that started with an LTS version can be completed with the same version in a reasonable amount of time. Nice for studios with large projects, but also for add-on maintenance.
A surprising amount of requests for LTS ‘agreements’ came from corporations who have more strict installation procedures internally – for various reasons they do not want individual employees to download our releases. An official LTS with controlled install would fit their procedures much better. We will further investigate this topic in the coming period.
For our daily testers and early adopters this is also good news. It means we will be able to more easily add experimental and new features in regular releases. Expect a continuous stream of new features and improvements. This rapid pace of releases is great to get new features to users quickly.
Release numberingAlong with this, I also propose to accelerate a bit our release numbers this decade.
This summer we’ll do Blender 2.90 (new particle nodes), and in summer 2021 the Blender 3.0 series begins! By then we will implement a more conventional release numbering.
I suggest to do minor releases (3.0, 3.1, 3.2, … 3.7) for two-year periods, and then move to a new major release. Blender 4.0 could be there in 2023 already!"​​

Visit the official Blog here for the full breakdown of their proposed plans for Blender over the next 5 years.

3 years ago when we started this studio, we bet it all on the future of Blender, so this report comes as a great reassurance in our initial leap of faith.

Here's to the next 5 years...

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